FarmVille: Mozilla Developers Thank Zynga for Firefox Fix

Mozilla's Firefox 3.6.4 came out last week on June 25th, with the team excited about a new crash protection feature meant to "reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games." Ironically, this crash protection ended up crashing most of Zynga's games (including FrontierVille), leaving a gray error screen, and the message, "The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed."

FarmVille Freak published a help guide for its community yesterday, shortly after the problem was officially recognized by Zynga. Players who hadn't updated their Firefox browsers, or who use Internet Explorer were unaffected and unaware of the issue. But the multitudes who had to deal with the downtime made their voices heard, and Mozilla itself has recognized Zynga's help in getting the Firefox browser speedily updated.

We would like to thank vendors, such as Zynga, for working with us to ensure that Firefox continues to provide the best user experience for our shared users. [Source: The Mozilla Blog]

Mozilla developers reported that the crash protection feature was tested on "a beta audience of close to one million users." But it seems the browser's true testing ground was FarmVille's nearly 64 million monthly active users.

Although complaints about Firefox's quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to Farmville, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease.

"A lot of people play Farmville. To ignore those people for any length of time could have a significant effect on Firefox's share of browser users," said Firefox user Jeff Rivett on Bugzilla Sunday. "The problem already existed, but the perceived impact suddenly changed, giving it a much higher priority." [Source: Computer World]

Speaking of which, one of those 64 million MAUs is gonna go chase some 'real' foxes off her FrontierVille homestead now. :)